InfoComm Recap

Between June 5th – June 10th, the BrightTree team attended our audiovisual industry tradeshow, InfoComm. Our principal’s attended educational courses regarding emerging trends in the industry and we have come away some exciting new ideas that we are looking forward to implementing in our designs.

The show also provided us an opportunity to see some of the new products that manufacturers are releasing this year. While we weren’t blown away by the new releases as we have been in the past, there are a few products that we think will make a splash for this upcoming year.

Montage – DisplayNote has created a wireless presentation and collaboration system known as Montage that provides a feature set that no other collaboration product offers. While it offers standard features such as wireless sharing from PCs, Macs, IOS, and Android devices, it has built in annotation capabilities while competitive software usually requires the user to download a 3rd party application for annotation. My favorite feature is the ability to “reach in” to someone else’s PC and take control of their machine. Of course, users have the ability to shut this functionality off, but it sure is nice to edit a co-worker’s Excel spreadsheet using your own laptop rather than telling them to adjust the value in cell 12D or add a 50% crosshatch border around cells 1A through 8F.

Planar – With awards from six of the industry’s major publications declaring the Planar TWA series LED wall the “Best of Show”, this was the clear favorite among the show’s large-venue LED walls. Showcasing an enormous 8K installation of 64 individual TWA series 1.2 millimeter pixel pitch displays and measuring in at more than 31 feet wide by 18 feet tall, this completely seamless video wall is a perfect solution for auditoriums, lobbies, and museum displays.

Catchbox
This is a personal favorite of mine although the application for this novel product is fairly limited. At BrightTree, we work with a large number of innovation spaces and tech companies that embrace the Silicon Valley start-up feel. A good percentage of these companies hold weekly all-hands meetings in a large venue such as their cafeteria or multipurpose room. During these meetings, employees are encouraged to ask questions, however, the questions are difficult to hear without a microphone system. Standard options to solve this issue are passing around a handheld microphone which is awkward and time consuming or installing ceiling-microphones throughout the space which is expensive. Catchbox has created a fun, playful throwable microphone for audience engagement. This wireless microphone is light, soft, and has an automute mode so that when no one is speaking into it, it’s not picking up random crowd noise or someone dropping the microphone. Plus, you can brand the Catchbox with your own company logo. Established tech companies such as Uber, Twitter, Google, Netflix, LinkedIn all use Catchbox for their all-hands meetings along with universities such as Stanford and UCLA. It’s a cool niche product that fits very well in the tech start-up culture.